Liberalism and Peace

0:00Thank you very much, Dr. Thornton. And I'd like to remind Dr. Thornton that if what is necessary to get a few more minutes for a person's talk is to deliver it with a German accent, I can do that too.

0:30Now, it might seem that being pro-peace rather than pro-war is a pretty unexceptionable point of view. Historically, however, that has not been the case. Over the centuries, multitudes of writers and thinkers have idealized war. From the time of the poet Homer on, Homer, who spoke of war, where men win glory. The voices of those who spoke on behalf of peace, on behalf of the people, rather than the warriors, were rarer. For instance, Jesus, of course, who blessed the peacemakers, and the Christian monk Erasmus, who castigated war in vitriolic terms.

1:15In modern times, classical liberals and libertarians, and that's what I mean by liberalism in the title of this talk, have always been in the forefront of the advocates of peace. Ludwig von Mises in his exposition of liberal doctrine placed peace third right after property and freedom as liberal ideals. Reversing the rather obscure dictum of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, Mises wrote, not war but peace is the father of all things. Murray Rothbard's tireless campaign for peace and against war and incitement to war is well known to the readers of his works. At the time, it caused writers for National Review to accuse Murray of being a communist sympathizer. Now, I knew Murray Rothbard. Murray Rothbard was a friend of mine.

2:05And one thing I can assure you of, Murray Rothbard was no comm-symp. Extolling peace has characterized those classical liberals usually labeled as the most doctrinaire or dogmatic. from the early 19th century liberals whose motto was pay et liberté, peace and liberty, to Frederic Bastiat, who proposed the unilateral disarmament of France, to Herbert Spencer, the bitter critic of British imperialism and especially of the war against the South African Boers, to Gustav de Molinari, the conservative anarchist who as Hans mentioned was the first to propose an end to monopoly government and who condemned Lincoln's war and invasion of of the South, to the American William Graham Sumner, who declared that McKinley's Splendid Little War was actually resulting in the conquest of the United States by Spain.

2:58And all through the writings of the founding fathers you can see the same thing. This is very typical from James Madison, whom my students are surprised to learn had something to do with the Constitution of the United States. Madison wrote,

3:45In English-speaking countries, the main grounds for identifying classical liberalism and peace are probably the work of the Manchester School and its leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright. Cobden and Bright are best known for their campaign for free trade, which culminated in the repeal of the Corn Laws. They held that unhampered freedom of commerce among nations was the surest road to material well-being of the people and to an even higher goal, world peace. Both Cobden and Bright were businessmen in the textile trades. They represented, they almost personified the industrious, creative, productive middle classes of Britain.

4:33They fought against coercive labor unions, as Cobden wrote, there's a desperate spirit of Monopoly and Tyranny at the bottom of these trade unions. That's what the Brits call them. They opposed state subsidies to the established church and all the other depredations of what John Bright called the tax-eating classes. Their cause was that of the tax-paying classes. Most of all, the Manchester School opposed militarism, imperialism and war. In the very The very first work he ever published, Cobden placed on the title page of the work, a quotation from George Washington's farewell address. The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, no isolationism, extending our commercial relations to have as little political connection with them as possible.

5:32So commerce with everyone, a few, if any, political connections. In the course of two decades, Richard Cobden developed into the greatest libertarian analyst of international relations who ever lived. The two volumes of his political writings, reprinted in the Garland Library of War and Peace in 1973, are devoted entirely to foreign policy. Cobden held that the greatest, as he said, the greatest home question is in reality the foreign question. Living in the heyday of British imperialism, that was a natural conclusion for him to reach. For America, however, it was not always so. For most of our history, other issues, the national bank, tariffs, states' rights, slavery and so on, were the central issues.

6:17But now we, like Cobden, have the privilege of living in the heyday of our imperialism. And now we, like Cobden, have the privilege of witnessing the truth of what he wrote about an imperialist country. For us, ominously, the most important of domestic issues is foreign policy. If you want to see just one expose of this, read James Boevard's book, Terrorism and Tyranny, Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil. Every page is white-hot of this book. I urge you to get it. It is remarkable how many of Cobden's insights are relevant to our own situation today. As I'm quoting a lot from Cobden here, In foreign politics, the masses are too little informed to protect themselves against fraud.

7:05He argued that the English knew little of foreign affairs. When it comes to foreign affairs, the British public, he says, is really just a big baby, his term, ready to accept any of the deceptions and mystifications of the government. As he said, even members of parliament were at a loss when it came to foreign policy. Which is really true enough, isn't it? And so parliament had abdicated any control in this area, which was in reality entirely in the hands of scheming ministers. He systematically doubted the claims of government leaders. As he said on foreign affairs, he refused to accept as true the word of any minister unless it could be authenticated by independent testimony. The ministers continually conjured up war scares.

7:51They wanted to be viewed as statesmen, as he says, but they talk exactly as if they'd taken passages from Baron Munchausen or Gulliver's Travels. In other words, they concoct bizarre fables. Does that ring a bell at all? Cobden mocked the argument that England had an obligation to spread civilization and Christianity to lesser breeds. His reply was, physician, heal thyself. This is Cobden speaking. I think as a corporate body, as a political community, if we can manage to do what is right and true and just to each other, if we can manage to carry out that at home, it will be about as much as we can do. I do not think I am responsible for seeing right and truth and justice carried out all over the world.

8:39Cobden was appalled at the fact that when it came to British imperialist operations overseas, when British forces blew up thousands of Indians and Chinese, all that the British public cared about was the death of a few British soldiers during those operations. The thousands of Indians and Chinese and all of the others meant nothing to them. And Cobden said, and this British public calls Revisionism was always an integral part of Cobden's analysis of foreign policy. Since the Revolution of 1688, he wrote, we have expended more than 1,500 millions of pounds in those days upon war, Wars, not one of which has been upon our own shores or in defense of our hearths and homes.

9:41He said the history of England must be rewritten, especially the history of the last century. A few weeks ago, our own learned president, who informed us, a dime a dozen, but who informed us before he went to Africa to cure AIDS there, which is, Congressman Paul will tell us which Article of the Constitution authorizes that, informed us that Africa is a country with incredible disease. Well our own learned president attacked the growing threat of revisionism in the land and even establishment historians replied to it, you have to have revisionism, history is constantly revised.

10:30But in any case what is the alternative to revisionism, supposing we didn't have any revisionism? Then the government's lies would be enshrined forever. The Spaniards blew up the USS Maine in Havana Harbor. The Lusitania was simply a peaceful passenger ship sunk for no good reason, had no munitions aboard. Franklin Roosevelt toiled day and night to keep America out of war and all the rest of it. No wonder that Bush's handlers are so afraid of revisionism. The most fundamental reason for opposition to war and its concomitants, imperialism and militarism, was stated succinctly by John Bright. None of these people are pacifists, by the way, they're all in favor of defending their own country, but unnecessary wars, gratuitous wars, horrified them. And John Bright, during one of his great speeches denouncing the war in the Crimea, and criticizing those who speak glibly of the need to go to war, he said, what is war? I believe I believe that half the people who talk about war have not the slightest idea of what it is.

11:33In a short sentence, it may be summed up as this. War is the combination and concentration of all the horrors, atrocities, crimes and sufferings of which human nature on this globe is capable. We can contrast with John Bright's compassion for those who suffer in wartime. Contrast with that the attitude of a prominent neoconservative, David Brooks, who wrote in the Murdoch Subsidized Weekly Standard The next few years will be defined by conflict. We will destroy innocent villages by accident, shrug our shoulders, and continue fighting. In an age of conflict, get this, in an age of conflict, bourgeois virtues, what, he's some kind of aristocrat from the Upper West Side, in an age of conflict, bourgeois virtues like compassion, Tolerance and industriousness are valued less than the classical virtues of courage, steadfastness, and a ruthless desire for victory.

12:35Brooks, like his fellow neocons, like to posture and talk as if they were modern-day Achilles and Hectors. But they're a little different from these ancient Greek and Trojan heroes. The neocons have never actually fought in combat, unlike Achilles and Hector, for instance, and they never will and it's not their children who will ever fight. You can count on that. David Brooks, incidentally, is the same great neocon intellectual. I mean they're really such intellectuals they must impress the hell out of President Bush.

13:13Brooks is the man who reviewed Ayn Rand's letters in the New York Times book review when they came out a few years ago and he attacked her for using the term parasites at the very same time when the news was beginning to come in of the Nazi massacre of the European Jews whom the Nazis also referred to as parasites right he actually wrote this it's tough well I don't want to say I published a little comment on that in Liberty magazine but I don't want to mention Or we can take Michael Ledin as another example of a neocon who blithely preaches the glories of war. After the Battle of Iraq, he writes, now it comes to Damascus, Tehran, Tripoli, Pyongyang, and Riyadh.

14:03They are on the list for invasion and overthrow. America must now go to war against Syria, Iran, Libya, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia. Arabia, Endless War and Endless Death. I am almost tempted to want to see it happen, to see this neocon dream come true, as C.S. Lewis said of his villains in his great Christian novel, That Hideous Strength, in their arrogance and their diabolical pride, they have pulled down deep heaven upon their heads and it utterly destroyed them. Today the state presents itself in two aspects, as the welfare state and as the warfare state. These two manifestations of the state are intimately intertwined. The welfare warfare state is a concept that Murray Rothbard used to analyze the state in its current phase. Herbert Spencer incidentally had already commented on the association of state coercion at home Home and Abroad. First, the warfare state supports and enhances the welfare state. A victorious warfare state, as the United States has tended to be, produces in its subject population

15:24a perverted pride and an infantile gratitude which translate into the readiness to welcome state action at home. This ideological shift has been brilliantly documented in modern and American History by Robert Higgs and his magisterial work Crisis and Leviathan. And is it an accident that our great war presidents, from Lincoln to Wilson to Roosevelt, Truman, Lyndon Johnson, have also been the greatest promoters of statism at home. In turn, an expanding welfare state prepares the people for state intervention and war abroad. The attitude of most Americans is reflected, I think, in the college students I run across. Not at the Mises Institute, I hasten to add. Our students are terrific, but at my own school and elsewhere. Their attitude on any domestic government welfare program is, why not? A problem exists. The media and their professors tell them it is a burning problem, the homeless prescription drugs for the elderly, whatever. So the natural, the inevitable solution that set up a welfare program and funnel taxpayers' dollars to it.

16:36Why not? No one ever told them. They have the slightest suspicion that there are principled and constitutional limits to what the government may do. Whenever something hurts, it's the government's job to fix it. Well then, now there's a problem overseas in some foreign country where some foreign people are hurting. Hurting, hurting, Bush used that term, his job is to help people who are hurting. People are hurting in Somalia, in Bosnia, Kosovo, or unliberated women in Afghanistan or wherever. The natural, the inevitable reaction now is to turn to the U.S. government. Well, why not? Isn't that the job of the U.S. government to right every wrong, to wipe away every tear anywhere, Central to the whole issue of war and peace is the question of language.

17:32The libertarian psychiatrist or rather anti-psychiatrist Thomas Saz has written, In the animal kingdom, the rule is eat or be eaten. In the human kingdom, the rule is define or be defined. This is nowhere more true than in the world of politics. Language, definitions of key terms are central to it, since most people, that's the way they are, judge more from words than realities. George Orwell was well aware of this. That is why in 1984, the state agency in charge of torturing and killing political opponents is called the Ministry of Love. and why the agency in charge of the incessant fabrication of new lies is called the Ministry of Truth.

18:21The statists have and continue to use the power of definition or redefinition with very great success. Probably their greatest success has been with the term isolationist. This goes back at least to the very end of the 19th century. William Graham Sumner complained that his opposition to the Spanish-American War, The War Against the Philippines and against the large policy of Theodore Roosevelt By the way, the neocons loved Theodore Roosevelt, of whom Charles Beard, the great historian, said he was probably the only important figure in American history, whoever thought that war was good in itself. So, Sumner opposed these policies and he was dismissed as an isolationist. But Sumner already had the repost.

19:09He said he was an isolationist only insofar as he wished to isolate his country from war. Imagine, calling someone like Sumner or Cobden or other great classical liberals, who promoted world-spanning free trade based on the gold standard, isolationists. But the term stuck. Now, anyone who was in favor of non-intervention, anyone opposed to U.S. meddling anywhere in the world, bombing at will peoples who have never attacked us, opposed any threat of attack, is dismissed as an isolationist. There are other examples. In the old days, the U.S. government had a war department, as well as a department of the Navy. That was clear enough. Its job was to wage war. On our road to World War II, for instance, a man named Henry Stimson was actually called the Secretary of War.

20:00As a great revisionist historian, Charles Tanzler, commented, no one ever deserved the name war. But in 1946, the War Department was amalgamated with the Navy and the Air Force was added to produce the Department of Defense, some defense department. After expending trillions of taxpayers' money, it turned out that this Department of Defense could not even defend its own headquarters from attack. No one seems to think there's anything strange about that. But the redefinition was a masterful stroke. Now all the trillions the government ends up eating and waging war, preparing to wage war all over the globe, are called defense expenditures.

20:47Even our people call them defense expenditures. Nowadays the government's wars are given propaganda names, which are supposed to ratify them by definition. In bygone days there were neutral names for military operations, overlord, torch and so on. Now we have Operation Enduring Freedom. Enduring Freedom is supposed to be what the U.S. military was supposed to bring to Afghanistan, of all places where freedom is likely to endure. Before there was an Operation Rescue Democracy to Haiti, that beacon of Jeffersonian democracy that is an inspiration to the world. Incidentally, the first propaganda use I can find for a military operation is Adolf Hitler's name for the invasion of Russia.

21:41He called it Operation Barbarossa, after the German emperor who led a Christian crusade to the east. Now we have Operation Iraqi Freedom, at least the hacks in the Pentagon. This time, smart enough not to name it Operation Iraqi Liberty, the initials would have sounded funny. There's nowadays the use of the term terrorists and Islamic terrorists, but this has not meant the KLA, KLA, the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army, on behalf of which the United States went to war with Serbia in 1999, bombed the hell out of those courageous people.

22:27This KLA, composed of militant Muslims, was by every common definition a terrorist organization. In fact, the U.S. State Department had labeled it a terrorist organization a few years before. The aim of the group was to eject the Serbian government and the Serbian population from from the province of Kosovo by assassination and other terrorist acts, typical policy of terrorist groups. By the way, this is an excellent book, a classic book called The First Casualty by Philip Knightley and his added chapters bringing it through the First Gulf War. The First Casualty, the famous saying, the first casualty of war is truth, and what he deals with are the government's lies from the time of the Civil War through the first Gulf War.

23:24And let me just mention, I'm getting tired of people talking about something being disingenuous, when what they mean is that it's a lie. It's as if these journalists have discovered the word disingenuous and are kind of showing off a little bit. We're talking about lies. We're talking about deliberate fabrications. The Serbians were supposed to have committed genocide against Albanians in Kosovo. It was just like the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. No sign of genocide was ever found. Just some 2,100 or so corpses never identified as to whether they were Albanian fighters or Serbian forces or civilian bystanders. It was all a lie.

24:09But who remembers his ancient history? Meanwhile, the Albanian Muslim militants have killed and chased out the remaining Serbs in Kosovo and blown up over 100 ancient Christian churches and shrines. I think it was bad for the Taliban to have blown up those Buddhist statues, but why doesn't anybody mention these hundred ancient Christian shrines in Kosovo that have been desecrated, blown up, destroyed by the Albanian Muslims? We don't hear about those because we were on the side of those Albanian Muslims. Then they talk about peacekeepers. Why peacekeepers instead of occupiers? Well, peacekeepers sounds a lot better. seems that the U.S. government is going to bring some thousands of Turkish peacekeepers into Iraq. There are already a few thousand Polish peacekeepers in place. All of them and all the rest of the coalition of the willing, coalition of the billing is what it was called, our modern day Hessians. Like the Hessians in the American Revolution, today the client states of the U.S. government sell their own conscript soldiers. In the case of Turkey,

25:18The Office of Soldiers was preceded by an offer of 8 billion dollars in an American loan. The Turkish people, the democracy, opposed sending the troops, but the Turkish elite overrode the people. Bankrupt states like Turkey and Poland sent peacekeepers to act as surrogates for our own mercenaries. It's all bought and paid for by American tax dollars. Today world politics floats on an ocean of American taxpayers' money. Foreign aid is not to feed starving Africans, but to cover the budget deficits of the ruling elites, bribing them to fall in line with the policies of the U.S. government elite. Dr. Paul last week delivered a characteristically courageous and a characteristically blistering attack on foreign aid on the floor of the House.

26:08I just want to say that there have been, since I started following politics many years ago, a few good men in Congress. Senator Robert Taft, for instance, I was the head of the Students for Taft in New York City in 1952. It was a very important position and I did a lot of good. Well, it was me against Wall Street. What do you expect? I shook the hand of Robert Taft. But to my mind, Ron Paul is the greatest member of Congress to have served in my lifetime. Now everyone keeps bringing up George Orwell in his novel, 1984.

26:53Let's remember that the protagonist of 1984, Winston Smith, had a job at the Ministry of Truth. His specialty was scanning old newspapers for articles and pictures that did not jibe with the current party line, because the party, big brother, was always right. Winston Smith accomplished this by excising, offending materials from the old files, tossing them down the memory hole, you know the term memory hole or Wellian memory hole, shooting them down to the furnaces in the depths of the Ministry of Truth. Today, no such cleansing of the historical record is necessary. Amazingly, what a comment on human nature.

27:41The true historical record is right there, everywhere. It continues to exist in hard copy in thousands of libraries. It's on the internet, it's on tens of thousands of personal hard drives all around the world. To take an example, check out Jim Boevard's excellent article last Thursday on lewrockwell.com, the 20th anniversary of the killing of 240 or so U.S. Marines in Beirut, and Boevard tells a story as everybody knows it is now, but that are lied about by the government at the time, and now no The Founding Fathers warned us especially against entangling alliances, George Washington from the Farewell Address, The nation which indulges towards another, and habitual hatred or habitual fondness, is to some degree a slave.

28:58Against the wilds of foreign influence, I conjure you to believe me, fellow citizens, the jealousy of the free people ought to be constantly awake. In Jefferson's first inaugural address, peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations entangling alliances with none. The founding fathers understood that war is the chief enemy of liberty and that the delicate constitutional balance they established could not prevail against endless wars. They also understood that entangling alliances would entangle us in such wars. Do we have such alliances today? Obviously there is NATO, which is never going to end.

29:45It's probably outlive the European countries, maybe the United States itself. It's a perpetual military bureaucracy. And then there is, most of all, the unconditional support and the continual immense subsidies that the U.S. government gives to Israel. Now, whenever anybody criticizes Israel, the Zionist Amen Corner starts yelling anti-Semite. What can you do? It's like institutional racism. You know, how can you defend yourself against something like that? But is it anti-Semitism that leads Jews like Norman Solomon, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, the libertarian, a friend of mine, Sheldon Richmond, to condemn Israeli and the Oppression of the Palestinians.

30:38Is it because they are anti-Semites that heroic Israelis like Rory Avnery and Ron Hacoen, you can read their articles on antiwar.com, attack their own government's murderous policies towards the Arabs? As Americans we cannot and must not have a foreign policy one of whose epicenters is the The Ruthless Expansionism of Ariel Sharon and the Liquid Party. Well, finally, I have to confess that my bitterness towards this administration and its neocon handlers is in part based on a personal element here. In my sunset years, I have looked forward to a well-deserved retirement.

31:27Enjoying my remaining time, reading, doing some research, and most of all, enjoying the winter wonderland that is Buffalo, New York. But the Bush government and the neocons have filled me with feelings I never thought I would have and I do not know how to cope with. Honestly, I never thought that I would regret Bill Clinton and wish that Bill Clinton were I never ever thought I would regret Janet Reno, who was a predecessor of our great John Ashcroft.

32:12For that and much else to this administration and its supporters, I say damn them, damn them all. Thank you very much.